Page 26 - Demo

26%u201cTHE WORKSHOP OF THE GODS%u201dHundreds of red hand prints are the only remaining signatures of a people who created this ancient artwork before disappearing into the jungle.They are some of the world%u2019s oldest murals and paintings and constitute an exceptional testimony of these early humans%u2019 vision of the world. Sacred beliefs have long been powerful engine of human cultural evolution and sacred symbolism has been produced by tens of thousands of years of human ancestry. There are geometric shapes along with tens of thousands of images of animals and humans, including fish, turtles, lizards andbirds, people dancing and holding hands, figures with masks.The rock art paintings seem to have been made for ritual and ceremonial purposes over an extensive period of time. Research has revealed that those who made these paintings had great technical and astronomical knowledge, as well as a complex symbolic thought.The great ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes kept this magnificent photograph he had taken of Chiribiquete over his desk at Harvard as a constant reminder of this enchanted land. Having heard of a magical realm in a remote Amazon region, Schultes mounted an expedition to the area in the 1940s, which is documented in: The Amazonian Travels of Richard Evans Schultes(By Brian Hettler and Mark Plotkin, 1991).pp 3: The sober-minded Schultes, never a man given to fights of poetic fancy, was deeply impacted by this landscape. He would later say that these rock formations seemed like giant sculptures left over from God%u2019s workshop: %u201cIt was from these first tentative experiments,%u201d Schultes mused, %u201cthat He had gone out and built a world%u201d (Davis, 1996, p. 318).pp 6: Schultes saw before him dark-red cave paintings covering the enormous rock walls. The designs depicted chaotic mosaics of animals, shamans, hunters, and dancers. Jaguars with intricate spot patterns leapt through the air. Shamans held long staffs and palm fronds above their heads while hunters stood alert with barbed spears, ready to be launched.It is thought that some of the first inhabitants of Amazonia created these pictographs on the rock walls of Chiribiquete.